Re: [gentoo-dev] "Commercial" software in portage

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 00:31 +0200, Marius Mauch wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 09:51:16 -0400
> Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@g.o> wrote:
>
> > Basically, we just add "commercial" to LICENSE in the ebuild, and (if
> > wanted or necessary) add "check_license
> > $licese_required_to_be_accepted" to pkg_setup on the ebuild.  While
> > this will break completely interactive ebuilds until GLEP23 is fully
> > implemented, a user can add the license to make.conf in an
> > ACCEPT_LICENSE variable, to keep portage from asking again.  This
> > means when a user does an "emerge -S" they will see the nice little
> > "commercial" listed under licenses, which will hopefully trigger to
> > them that this package is not free.  Another possible addition is a
> > "commercial-free" license, which would cover things like America's
> > Army and Enemy Territory (I'm sure there are others, but I know of
> > these two) that are free for users to use, but are still commercial
> > software.
>
> Can't say that I exactly like this, mainly because "commercial"
> wouldn't be a real license and so kinda blurs the meaning of LICENSE.
> But then one could say the same about "as-is". My other concern is that
> there is no clear criteria for commercial packages, e.g. are sun-jdk /
> other fetch restricted packages commercial?

I thought I had made it fairly clear, but I can elaborate.

"commercial" would be anything that requires a purchase to use.  This
could be anything from specific media (such as most games) to a CD key
or license file.

The basic idea is to put in a marker to let people know that "This won't
work without you spending money."

This isn't a marker of whether something is proprietary, but rather a
marker of whether something works out of the box.  Sun's JDK, while it
could be argued whether it would be "commercial" or not, does work out
of the box, once you fetch the sources.  You don't have to purchase it.

> That said, it's probably the best approach that doesn't require portage
> changes.

This is primarily why I proposed it, as it can be done now without any
extra code for portage.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux